I recently stumbled across an interview with Dr. LaBerge on a radio call in show called After Dark.

Something struck me as strange. A big logic hole, unless I'm mistaken:

1. Dreams are experience and experience is what is real.

The example was of someone being frightened by a bear. The person wakes up and a friend says, "there wasn't really a bear so you weren't really frightened."

Dr. LaBerge makes that point that it doesn't matter that it wasn't there but that since you experienced the fright, that's what made it real.

2. Lucid dreaming offers complete unhibited freedom. No hubris, consequences, etc.

It's the most "real" versions of ourselves. Uninhibited, we do what we want without worrying about the long term consequences.

Question: If I cheat on my wife/steal from someone/kill someone in a dream, I experienced it. And if experience is real, how can lucid dreaming offer consequence-free action?

Unless of course, you completely redefine reality, I don't see how #2 can be true. It would seem that in the above context "real" would be the reality we experience when we are awake and going about our business, as defined by the majority of people who get to say what "reality" is and is not.

I'm suddenly finding myself trying to define reality just so I can begin to understand what he said! Nobody warned me that I was going to have to think to use this forum!

I wonder what's on tv...

Kerry,

Thinking is optional.

Good question. I know I sometimes wake up feeling guilty about what I did to someone in a lucid dream. What a bummer! Still, I'm starting to work on treating my dream characters with a little more respect, precisely because I do believe it matters very much--to me! And that makes it real enough.

Paul

Exactly.

I think you've got the right attitude, Paul. I tend to think, though I couldn't really debate my position, that you'll end up getting more out of your dream on some emotional maturity/karmic/open minded level.

Isn't there some group somewhere studied by anthropologists where they found that if a member of the tribe has a selfish dream, it's his responsibility to do two good things for the dream victim the next day?

Precisely, Paul!

After all, just who are our dream characters anyway? Lucid dreams offer us a safe place to examine options and rehearse the responses we want to make more often in waking reality, as well as an opportunity to practice compassion towards our fragmented selves disguised as "others".

Kerry: Thanks for bringing this topic up once again. It's never too often to think about this particular aspect of lucid dreaming and lucid loving. Ah, well I meant to type lucid living, but I think I'll let it go as is. ;) The idea of extending acts of kindness towards someone whom one mistreated in a dream is interesting. I can see where, if the action comes not from a sense of guilt but from an enlightened sense of compassion, this could be a worthwhile exercise.

Thanks for making me think too! Keelin

Here's the kicker:

That society (the ones who place a high value on their dreams) have very low incidents of violence and of mental health problems.

Critical question: how many people are in said society? Numbers change everything.

Still, I think the idea has merit because it doesn't cost you much to be nice to someone. Generally speaking of course.

Kerry:

Here's an additional kicker: isn't there a chance (especially if it is small) that that society would behave in exactly the same manner toward each other even if they didn't choose to qualify their dream behavior? A group that sets up rules like that clearly has parity, or at least kindness, already in mind, so the actions from dreams are just additional, not necessarily the foundation for their morality.

On another note, but relative to the stuff above, my wife gets a little jealous when she hears I have dream sex with her. So she's attaching a level of "reality" to my LD experience, regardless of how I position it (sorry, bad pun in this case). Indeed, try telling someone that you hurt them, killed them, or loved them in a lucid dream, and then watch their reaction. I'll bet in most cases their initial emotional reaction will term the dream as a real event. Reason may or may not prevail shortly afterward, depending on the person, but it is interesting to note that, just for a flash, the thing you did to or for a person was indeed real to them.

In the retelling, how different, experience-wise, is a lucid dream memory from any other memory?

Something more to think about"

Peter

CLARIFICATION

I've been happy to see the thoughtful level of discussion on the forum lately. Thanks to all for whom the shoe fits.

I believe Kerry slightly misheard what I presumably said in that interview. As Kerry correctly notes, I gave the example of someone being frightened by a bear. The person wakes up and a friend says, "there wasn't really a bear so you weren't really frightened."

However, my next two points somehow got merged: I then said, the friend is right about the bear not really being there, but wrong about the dreamer not being "really frightened". An important distinction! Yes, when we dream that events occur which alter physical (and hence consensual/shared) reality, such as "I dreamed there was a major earthquake" I find upon waking that it does not correspond with physical reality, and thus using actual as a synonym for physical, "it didn't actually happen." But the fact that I had the experience gave it phenomenal reality (for me) at the time. In other words, the earthquake actually happened "only" in the dreamer's phenomenal world. Which is also where of course whatever feelings or thoughts the dreamer had at the time occurred. But that's where all feelings and thoughts occur!

So, Kerry's first premise needs a bit of modification. Likewise his second premise: no, lucid dreaming doesn't necessarily offer complete freedom. It just offers more freedom than the waking state for the same reason that we have more freedom in private than in public. Right?

We do have to take into account consequences of our lucid dreaming actions: in particular changes in our dispositions to behave in one or another fashion, in other words, changes to ourselves. So charity begins at home.

CLARITAS ET CARITAS!

Stephen

Thanks for the clairifcation, Stephen. My humble apologies for munging what you said in the interview. I only open my mouth to change feet.

I look forward to misquoting others in the near future.

On the same general topic, a personal observation of mine, and I'd like to hear from others who may have experienced the same. I've reviewed my dream journal re: emotional dream states, etc. Clearly I used to have a great deal more violence, competition anxiety, and general strife in my dreams than I am now seeing since I have begun having lucid dreams. I have not consciously done anything to alter this. My waking life is as stressful as ever. My dreams have just calmed down. Is this a common effect of lucid dreaming itself, does anyone know?

Paul

Hi, Peter. Just trying to get caught up around here. Reading your posts is always a great place to start. :-)

The type of emotional reaction you describe when we tell people about our dream behavior seems relevant to the prevailing-- and understandable-- view that our dream behavior reflects our character. (Just how, and how much, is something open to discussion and qualification).

If someone is startled to hear about some behavior we describe in a dream, this may be due to their feelings about what that behavior seems to reveal. Maybe this is part of the fleeting sense that a dream is "real" to people when they hear it. (?)

(It occurs to me that being lucid or non-lucid could be a factor here in our culpability... but anyway...)

Going a bit further, if you buy into this notion, it's as if a Freudian slip-up on the part of our dream ego effectively causes trouble in the waking world. :-)

And what is our motivation in telling our dreams? Hmmm...

Dream off, Dream on,

reverie

Reverie!

Just a quick clarification: The real time to measure a listener's reaction is in the telling of a lucid dream.

Regular dreams (which I rarely describe anyway) might elicit that response too, based on embedded symbolism, but when the listener (and subject of the LD) understands that you were conscious in the dream and that you're relaying a "real" memory of a dream that by virtue of lucidity transcends symbolism, their initial emotional reaction might relate directly to your actions in the dream. This is because they assume (for an instant) your experience of the dream was real.

I'm not sure if I properly made that point before. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I'm making that point now. Oh well!

Perhaps our motivation in sharing LD's is to make that real moment even more real by creating a memory of it in someone else's mind. ;)

Incoherently,

Peter

P.S. Okay, now MY brain hurts...

Paul, I'm going to review my dream journals and see if I can observe the same phenomenon. It's a good question.

My sense is that it may be the same for me, but to confirm it I'll have to dig back in the dusty volumes... I've been lucid dreaming with some regularity since the late 1980s.

Into the dream archives, reverie

Peter,

I like that last statement a lot. I think you're on to something there. Maybe deep down--or not so deep down--we aren't really sure that our LD's are only dreams, don't want them to be only dreams, or want to be sure that they are only dreams. Take your pick. When I share my lucid dreams, it's partly out of a sense of absolute amazement, probably because it's still a new experience. I'm looking to share with others who have experienced it just how awed I am. Maybe that goes away in time.

Thanks, Paul

Paul:

That feeling hasn't worn off with me yet, and I've been doing this for 25 years!

Peter

Peter, you are never incoherent. Thank you for that important distinction I failed to make myself.

Oh, and my brain hurts too.

Back from sabbatical but not quite here,

reverie

Keelin:

Watch out -- it looks like the participants in this thread might be applying for dreamer's compensation soon!